On each vile mouth set purity, on each low forehead grace.
These poems were of life within America or without it, but in “An Ode in Time of Hesitation” and “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines” Moody warned the rulers in Washington that the country, now awake to its duties in the world, would forgive blindness, but baseness it would smite. Finally, in “The Quarry” he cried out in pride at America’s fine part in preventing the partitioning of helpless China by the grasping European empires,—the achievement of the poet-diplomat, John Hay.
Throughout all Moody’s work is a constant undercurrent of evolutionary thought—not the brutal mechanism associated with the term “Darwinism,” but the aspiring impulse within all life which makes it rise not through struggle against outer forces so much as through the innate impulse to develop. In the sardonic “Menagerie” the idea is ironically stated:
Survival of the fittest, adaptation,
And all their other evolution terms,
Seem to omit one small consideration,
which is no less than the existence of souls:
Restless, plagued, impatient things,
All dream and unaccountable desire;
and these souls are expressions of the universal soul which finds its own salvation in unceasing “groping, testing, passing on,”—the creative struggle described by Raphael in “The Masque of Judgment” as